The members of the New Mexico Libertarian Party have been kind
enough to ask me back to address their annual convention again next
spring. The dates are April 13-15, 2007, and you should consider
showing up. If enough new people attend, I promise not to bring my
guitar.

With a history-making midterm election behind us, and an equally
crucial general, or Presidential election looming just over the
horizon in 2008, I have naturally given a great deal of thought to
what I want to say to my colleagues, comrades, and so-far-unindicted
co-conspirators in New Mexico, regarding what I believe libertarians,
both as individuals and as a political party, should be doing about
it.

Perhaps a brief review of the important points is in order, here.
Although the United States haven't had anything that anybody could
accurately describe as good government over the past two centuries (in
truth, most libertarians, including yours truly, don't believe that
good government is possible), they have had quite a lot of worse
government.

Placing high among the worst Presidential administrations in
history is that of George W. Bush, a remarkably mediocre individual
who failed shamefully to prevent the tragedies of September 11, 2001,
but used them, instead, as an excusein the exact manner of Adolf
Hitler after the Reichstag Fireto force a disgusting bundle of
unconstitutional and fascistic legislation through a Congress composed
of zombies and sleepwalkers, destroying whatever tattered shreds
remained of the Bill of Rights. He then set up a new Gestapo to coerce
a once-free people into intimidated compliance with his decrees, and
established a chain of secret prisons overseas in which those who have
been designated enemies of the regime can be be illegally held and
tortured.

This, of course, is not to mention two illegal, irrational, and
inconceivably murderous and costly wars that Bush and his orcs lied
America into, which have absolutely nothing to do with what happened
on September 11, 2001if they had, we'd have sent troops storming
into Saudi Arabiabut in fact were planned cynically by an alliance
of Bush's mercantilist operators in the petroleum industry and the
neoTrotskyites who would eventually become Bush's intellectual palace
guard, no fewer than ten years before the New York World Trade Center
collapsed.

The former group merely wants to corner the world's energy market.
The latter lusts openly, nearly to the point of public salivation, to
control the entire planet. For now, the interests of both groups run
parallel.

This is not the case for the country's Productive Class, already
paying far too much for energy while watching viable alternatives get
suppressed, and whose children are being maimed and slaughteredat
their exorbitant expensein yet another of America's pointless,
stupid wars. It came as no suprise to this correspondent, anyway)
that, given a chance to repudiate Bush, they gave the President and
all of his works what Sting once called "a humiliating kick to the
crotch".

Unfortunately, the only available means they had of doing it was
by embracing the Democrat Party, whose presidents and politicians are
responsible for each and every one of America's stupid, pointless wars
in the 20th century, including World War I, World War II, Korea, and
Vietnam.

At this point in history, it would be insane for anyone to believe
that either of the two "major" parties actually gives a damn about
peace, freedom, progress, or prosperity for anybody but themselves and
their cronies. If any of those commodities can be purchased by the
sacrifice of someone else, or someone else's sons and daughters, then,
as Madeline Albright said of the U.S. government's deliberate murder
by starvation of half a million innocent Iraqi children, "It's worth
it."

History will showtoo late, as alwaysthat American voters
have not improved their circumstances by putting more Democrats back
into office. The wars won't stop, the Patriot Act won't be repealed,
the Department of Homeland Security won't be abolished, the cameras
won't go away. And if they should add the White House to the list of
the Democrats' holdings in 2008, as they will almost certainly do,
then this country's chances of survival as anything but a widescreen,
Technicolor SurroundSound Hollywood remake of Pol Pot's Cambodia are
zero.

Does this mean the voters should have left Republicans in control?
Absolutely not. We were headed exactly the same direction, under Bush,
that the Democrats will try to take us now. Which should be proof
enough for anybody but the most brain-numbed among us that there's
really only one "major" in American politics, the Boot On Your Neck
Party.

What it does mean is that Americans can't afford to maintain the
Democrats in power now that they have successfully supplanted the
Republicans, nor can we afford to return Republicans to power in 2008.
The sobering truth is that the last hope for America's Productive
Class individuals and families rests with the one and only movement
standing in genuine philosophical opposition to the evil institutions
and ideas that would impoverish and enslave themand with a single,
tiny (and, to be absolutely, brutally truthful about it, mostly inept
and horribly ineffective) political organization affiliated with that
movement.

For very nearly as long as there has been a Libertarian Party (it
started in 1971, I joined in 1972, although I had been a philosophical
libertarian for a decacde by then), I have urged its leadership and
members to pursue a strategy and to employ tactics that are completely
out of reach to the various and vile minions of the Boot On Your Neck
establishment.

In those early days, my urgings pretty much fell on deaf ears.

I once suggested that libertarians should organize and write angry
lettersto advertisers, rather than editorsin order to change
the collectivist editorial policies of major newspapers. Nobody did
it, I suppose because whining is so much easier than actually doing
something.

I once suggested the Libertarian Party produce typical Wednesday
supermarket sale adson actual newsprintas they might someday
appear in The Libertarian Times (Hamburger, Five Cents a Pound), and
distribute them during campaigns, but it never happened, because it
was too much work, and "wiser heads" decided the voters wouldn't get
it. (Recently, I offered libertarians the slogan "One Dollar GasVote
Libertarian", but I never saw it being used during the 2006
election.)

Finally, lacking any other course to follow, I took my own advice,
and wrote my first novel, The Probability Broach, the purpose of
which was to show people what might await them in a culture operating
on libertarian principle. Although the story was about sideways time
travel, from one historically alternative universe to another, it was
also about a time to come, a time that a free people might reasonably
expect to build for themselves and even begin looking forward to right
now.

In short, what I offered people in The Probability Broachwhat
I have always urged the Libertarian Party to offer themwas
the future presently being looted out from under them by Democrats and
Republicans.

The key to a libertarian future is the libertarian future itself.
Forget the Hollow Woman standing on what used to be Bedloe's Island
offering false promises of liberty and welcome. Let us adopt the
future itselfsome unmistakable aspect of the futureas our
logo.

True, there a lot of obstacles to overcome: crooked election laws,
crooked elections, corrupt officials, deliberate legal obstructions,
outright disregard for the law when it works for us and against the
BOYNers. But we don't have to overcome these obstacles by ourselves.
Give people a good enough reason, and they'll storm the Bastille for
you, clean out the judiciary with flamethrower and firehose, and hang
an election official or a judge from each and every lamppost in the
city.

The key to a libertarian future is the libertarian future itself.
The other parties are afraid to talk about the future. We are the
future. Let the other parties and their whorish captive media laugh
and make fun of usit's free advertising, and pretty soon the
people will begin to wonder "What So Funny About Peace, Love, and
Understanding?"

Not to mention freedom.

Four-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith has
been called one of the world's foremost authorities on the ethics
of self-defense. He is the author of 25 books, including The
American Zone, Forge of the Elders, Pallas, The Probability Broach,
Hope (with Aaron Zelman), and his collected articles and speeches,
Lever Action, all of which may be purchased through his website
"The Webley Page" at
lneilsmith.org.

Ceres, an exciting sequel to Neil's 1993 Ngu family novel
Pallas was recently completed and is presently looking for a
literary home.

A decensored, e-published version of Neil's 1984 novel, TOM
PAINE MARU is available at:
http://payloadz.com/go/sip?id=137991.
Neil is presently working on Ares, the middle volume of the
epic Ngu Family Cycle, and on Roswell, Texas, with Rex F. "Baloo"
May.

The stunning 185-page full-color graphic-novelized version of The
Probability Broach, which features the art of Scott Bieser and was
published by BigHead Press
www.bigheadpress.com
has recently won a Special Prometheus Award. It may be had through the publisher, at
www.Amazon.com,
or at BillOfRightsPress.com.

TLE AFFILIATE

Great deals on great computer hardwareTiger Direct!
Now accepting PayPal